This is an exciting week for FUEL as we gear up for two major college access conferences. Tomorrow, FUEL Founder and Chairman, Bob Hildreth, heads to Washington D.C. for the 2012 National College Access Network regional conference. Educators, policymakers and thought leaders will join together to explore ways of advancing equity in higher education. During tomorrow’s Best Practices Panel, Bob will discuss how the FUEL program is expanding opportunities to low-income families. This panel aims to address cross-cutting topics like college readiness and family engagement.
FUEL’s Director of Programming, Kaitlin LeMoine, will also speak tomorrow at the National Partnership for Educational Access annual conference in Chicago. The goal of this year’s meeting is to encourage participants to forge innovative collaborations and create strategies for supporting underrepresented students. Kaitlin will facilitate a workshop on implementing effective family engagement strategies, helping participants discuss, devise and evaluate their own plans to increase parental involvement in higher education preparation for their children.
Both Bob and Kaitlin will tweet live updates from the conferences throughout the day, so be sure to follow us @FUEL_Education all day tomorrow! We’ll also post new blogs about the conferences on FUEL Voices.
In The Lottery, a new documentary on school choice, a father of an elementary school child emotionally expresses his hopes that one day his son will attend college. He fights back tears as he remembers his own dreams as a child. The man wanted to be an astronaut, but due to the little support from his teachers and the low expectations the school placed on the students, he never realized that it was possible for him to go to college; no one ever fanned his spark of aspiration. No one encouraged or supported his ability to learn. And he would not let that happen to his own son.
In Chelsea, Massachusetts, FUEL helps parents, just like this father, send their children to college. And now, FUEL, working in conjunction with Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC), Chelsea Public Schools and Choice Thru Education, will be able to offer the encouragement and support to 500 talented Chelsea students so that they can achieve a higher education.
The Department of Education has awarded BHCC a Talent Search Grant totaling $1,150,000 over five years to initiate a special college preparation and readiness program to students in Chelsea High School and the Eugene Wright Middle School. Each of the 500 families will receive academic, financial and personal support services.
The FUEL staff is happy to continue its successful work in Chelsea with BHCC and with Choice Thru Education to help low-income parents and their first-generation-to-college children realize their dreams of higher educations and start their careers. Whether their career goal is to be a nurse, lawyer, teacher, doctor or astronaut, the Talent Search Grant will be the first step.
We are also thrilled that these funds will support Choice Thru Education in its crucial and life-changing program that provides GEDs to pregnant teens and young mothers in Chelsea.
We congratulate BHCC for winning such an important grant, thank BHCC for sharing the grant to support these worthy initiatives, and look forward to working together to make a real difference in the lives of so many families!
Here at FUEL, we work hard to ensure that our families understand that a college degree is within their reach, despite the financial challenges they face. Some of the ways we do this include: providing families with the guidance to start and maintain their own bank accounts; educating them about pertinent scholarship information; and introducing them to important networks in the education and financial communities to help them navigate the college process. And we do this because we know that our families can ultimately make an impact in this world.
We received a letter from one of the students who just graduated from our Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC) program that really touched our hearts, so we wanted to share it. Bao Tran is headed to UMass Amherst in the fall!
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To Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center;
I am very thankful for the opportunity to be a part of 2011’s Fuel program. It has helped both myself and my parents to understand the inner workings of the college process and has given my parents the information necessary so that I may talk to them concerning the future of my education. Without the Fuel program’s help I would have been on my own dealing with the college process.
When I reached the last year of my High School career I had hoped that my parents would be able to help me deciding what college to go to and how we were going to pay for it. Unfortunately being first generation immigrants as well as haven worked full time ever since they immigrated to the United States meant that they had no knowledge of the college process. They have a limited understanding of English and I am not very fluent of Vietnamese. There would not have been any way in which I could have explained things like the Fafsa to them. Even if we were able to talk, we did not know enough about loans and the financial aspect to come up with a plan to pay for my education. Therefore they were not able to offer me any help, I was on my own.
The Fuel program was very helpful in explaining the key concepts in choosing a college, applying for it and how to check if it was the right choice and if it had all that I wanted. It was also exceedingly good at informing us about the ways in which we can pay off the cost of college. What I though was the most important key points of the program is the opportunity that it gave me and my parents to come together and discuss my plans for college during the workshops. I was able to talk to my parents and explain what I could, and there were staffs there that could help explain what I could not. Thanks to these opportunities we were able to overcome the obstacles of being unable to communicate about the college process.
To deal with the college process alone without the help of my parents would have caused me a lot of stress and frustration. However I was able to join the Fuel program and am now happily on my way to a rewarding experience college.
Sincerely.
Bao Tran
CONGRATULATIONS to the Massachusetts recipients of the Next Generation Learning Challenge, which recently awarded $7 million in grants to 19 worthy recipients around the country, including five schools and organizations in Massachusetts.
As an organizational friend of ours, Next Generation Learning Challenges works to promote educational technologies and innovations that help prepare U.S. students for the college journey and future opportunities. NGLC will award multiple grants over the next few years to different organizations that fulfill this mission.
We want to send a special congratulatory message to the University of Massachusetts – one of our partners – and Ivon Arroyo, who has developed Intelligent Digital Mathematics Tutoring for K-12 students. This program is a mathematics-focused, real-time tutoring system that is geared toward at-risk seventh- to ninth-grade students in urban and rural Massachusetts to improve their grades and standardized test scores. We are proud of our partner university and its valuable initiative!
You can read all about Next Generation Learning Challenge winners here: http://nextgenlearning.org/sites/site-1/assets/FINAL_NGLC_Wave_II_Grant_Winners_Press_Release_6.13.11.pdf
And don’t forget to follow them on twitter @NextGenLC and on Facebook at /nextgenlearning.
Education and high school dropout rates are crucial issues in Massachusetts, and issues that CommonWealth Magazine follows as it covers politics, ideas, and civic life in our state. An opinion piece by FUEL founder and executive director Bob Hildreth is now featured in the online “Voices” section of the publication, called Scholarships that keep students in the high school race: Dangle aid money sooner.
Bob writes about the importance of presenting scholarships as goals early on in high school, or perhaps even middle school, in order to motivate students to stay in school and achieve. And when parents learn that college can in fact be within their financial reach with the help of aid and scholarships, they’re inspired to save and encourage their children to study.
You can read the full piece here:
We look forward to hearing your feedback and comments! Please feel free to distribute this link on Twitter and Facebook, as well.
You can follow FUEL on Twitter @FUEL_Education and CommonWealth Magazine @CommonWealthMag.
FUEL founder and executive director Bob Hildreth debuted as a guest blogger on edboard.com, an online community dedicated to education professionals and leaders. His post focuses on changing the scholarship system to an aspirational model, in the hopes of sparking ambition and keeping more kids in school.
You can read the full blog post here:
College Scholarships: The Latest Underachievers
On edboard.com, you can also find blog posts and resources from a number of teachers and other education professionals. We encourage you to join the discussion online!
In the current issue of “The Good Men Project Magazine,” FUEL founder and executive director Bob Hildreth is featured in the article, “A Dream Act: On Education, Immigration, and Goodness.”
Writer and Good Men Project co-founder Tom Matlack spent one-on-one time with Bob and attended a Savings Circle, which gave him a deep understanding of Bob’s background in finance and immigration issues, his current educational mission at FUEL, and how FUEL is positively influencing its families.
You can read the full article here:
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/a-dream-act-on-education-immigration-and-goodness/
While FUEL is involved in the immigrant community in Massachusetts, FUEL also serves to help ALL underserved families who have children that are eager to succeed in high school and attend college, regardless of background or ethnicity.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Additional Online Resource Links:
Have fun while also supporting FUEL. Buy today’s LevelUp deal for yourself and 25% of all revenue goes directly to FUEL!
Our recent partnership with LevelUp gives us 25% of all profits generated from this week’s local deal for: $5 for $10 Worth of Dinner @ 570 Market. Now you can support Families United in Educational Leadership just by grabbing dinner at 570 Market!
In addition to launching our new web site at the start of 2011, we’ve also joined Facebook and Twitter so we can stay in even closer contact with our community. We’re posting news about FUEL, commenting on information we find interesting, following new friends, and staying in touch with YOU. So visit our pages, share your thoughts, and become part of the FUEL community!
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FUEL_Education
Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/FUEL/117019888363435?v=info
It’s always gratifying to see your hard work recognized, so the FUEL team was thrilled when this AP story appeared on Sunday, February 20. The feature details how Bob Hildreth came to found our organization, what we do, and who it affects.
We’re grateful to reporter Russell Contreras, whose story will undoubtedly introduce FUEL to even more potential partners and community organizations, which can then connect us with the families who can benefit from the work we do. Families like Felix Mendoza Chavez and his daughter Carolina Aleman, to whom Mr. Contreras spoke for the feature. Before FUEL, Mr. Chavez thought college was a financially unattainable goal for Carolina. Now, he’s putting money away every month, attending Savings Circles, and making sure 14-year-old Carolina stays motivated to further her education.
Mr. Contreras also talked with Patricia Gandara, co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project and co-author of “The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies.” FUEL is different than most other programs that share its goal of getting more low-income students to attend college because, said Gandara, “a match program like this is pretty unique.”
We couldn’t agree more. And we couldn’t be prouder of the families we’re helping save for college.
CHECK OUT SOME OF THE ADDITIONAL COVERAGE GENERATED BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF DAYS:
FUEL helps underserved families realize their dreams of a higher education and break the cycle of poverty.
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